Question

I have a signup form that needs to be loaded for every page of my site if the user is a guest. I figured the easiest way to do this would be to create a “signup” app/module and have the form variable defined in the init.py so it was automatically initiated on every view, assuming I imported the module. However, I’m having a bit of trouble getting my view to find the form variable. “global name ‘form’ is not defined” Below is my setup:

I have a /signup/init.py and /signup/form.py files.

This is my init.py

from django import forms
from signup.form import SignUpForm

form = SignupForm()

This is my form.py

class SignupForm(forms.Form):
    fullname = forms.CharField(min_length=3, max_length=25, initial='name', error_messages={'required': 'A unique username is required.', 'min_length': 'Your username must contain at least 3 characters.'})
    username = forms.CharField(min_length=3, max_length=25, initial='choose a username', error_messages={'required': 'A unique username is required.', 'min_length': 'Your username must contain at least 3 characters.'})
    password = forms.CharField(min_length=7, initial='choose a password', error_messages={'required': 'Please enter a password.','min_length': 'Your password must contain at least 7 characters.'})
    email = forms.EmailField(initial='e-mail address', error_messages={'required': 'Please enter a valid email address.', 'invalid': 'Please enter a valid email address.'})
    find_me = forms.BooleanField(initial=True, required=False)
    tos = forms.BooleanField(error_messages={'required': 'You must accept our Terms of Service.'})

And I’m trying to load those from my /views/index.py file:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from pymongo import *
from user import *
import mongo
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.template import RequestContext, loader
import signup

#index view
def index(request):

    return render_to_response('index.html',
        {'form': signup.form},
        context_instance=RequestContext(request),
    ) 

I removed the irrelevant code in index.py… but basically.. (i’ll probably have an if else for the return statement to only return the ‘form’:form when the user is unregistered)

Am I approaching this completely wrong? Anyone mind showing me what I’m doing incorrectly?

::Edit::

Also, I noticed that I didn’t have signup.form in the return, but that still throws a

AttributeError at /
'module' object has no attribute 'form'

error. I changed the code above to accommodate that

Answer 1

I would just point out that the way you’re doing it is an extremely bad idea. You have one instance of the form across every request: that’s always going to be dangerous, allowing the possibility of information leakage across requests. Don’t do it.

Instead, use the built-in mechanism that Django has to do this for you: context processors. In your signup/form.py, define a simple function:

def signup_form(request):
    return SignupForm()

and add this to TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS in settings.py:

'signup.form.signup_form',